


without my voice, i scream

by CloudDreamer



Category: The Bifrost Incident - The Mechanisms (Album), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Dr Carmilla's A+ Parenting, Hugs, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Lyf Lives, Mechanization, Other, Sign Language, non-consensual science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:08:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23472979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: To be Lyfrassir Edda is to be [DATA NOT FOUND].
Relationships: Lyfrassir Edda & The Mechanisms, Raphaella la Cognizi/Lyfrassir Edda
Comments: 6
Kudos: 80
Collections: Mechs Fic Exchange





	without my voice, i scream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SailorMinerva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SailorMinerva/gifts).



> You can have a little prison mechs reunion + mechanized!Lyf hurt/comfort. As a treat.

_Too late._

_They’d left too late. They’d made it out of the main system, past Vanheim. They were so close to the mining colony; they’d started strapping themself in for the landing when they heard that damned song. They’d been so close. They didn’t turn to look. They didn’t need to._

_They felt the ship— no, their reality— melting around them. They maintained a human form, not subjected to the horrifying mutations they’d seen the passengers on the Ratotskar undergo. Their mind, they suspected, was already twisted. Already touched._

_They weren’t as far gone as Loki or Odin. Their memories of the time before the abyss was in tact, even if they were blurry. They fought the song that rose in their chest, violently rejecting the words of an eldritch chant they’d never heard before but knew. They knew it like they knew the beat of their heart, too fast and trying desperately to escape their chest._

_There was another on that ship: the pilot and owner of the Silvana. She was unaffected by the madness that consumed them, as if the ancient powers that fled through the tear in reality, immeasurably vast, chose to step around her. She sat perched on a box of supplies. Her lips curled upwards in a discordant smile, examining not the maelstrom of broken reality around and inside her ship, which she gave nothing more than a quick once over, but them. Cold. Curious. They didn’t realize they’d fallen on the ground, clutching their mouth and trying to shove it closed. The remains of their humanity fought to stay silent, but they were losing. If they started screaming, they knew, then they would never stop. They scratched bloody gouges into their throat with too-sharp nails, and for a moment, they manage to looked up to her, one word escaping—_

_“Help,” they whimper._

_Their pitch is too high, beyond what any human should’ve been able to hear, they know, but she hears anyway. They don’t think to question it — they don’t think at all. The lines of flesh they’d torn out bleed, not with any colors too far beyond their comprehension, but the same red. The single word is an admission of defeat. The first syllables of cursed words start to escape, even as their hands reach their vocal cords, tearing them out and forcing the ragged sounds to stop. They want it all to stop.  
_

-  
There’s something wrong when you wake up. 

You can’t remember how you got here. You try to, but the last thought that’s not blurred out with blurs of colors you shouldn’t be able to see is of meeting her at a bar. 

Her hair was loose around her angular face, a bright blue that shined with smaller shades in the dark light. Her eyes were two different colors, but only one of them moved to focus on you. You didn’t comment on the sharp teeth or how cold her hands were when she took your money. Cold like death. 

You can’t move. No, you can twitch a toe. Then another. Every time a piece of you comes back, you feel a shock of electric pain. You can’t scream, not yet, and you know your voice will be the last thing to come back. You know it like you know some fundamental truth of the world— things fall down after you throw them, your voice will come back last, you can’t hurt Dr. Carmilla. 

The thought isn’t alarmed. It’s normal. That’s what makes every piece of you that can move, move. It’s so little to compensate for the horror that should be rising in your throat like bile. Then you notice something else. It’s deathly silent. You can’t hear your own heart. You can’t feel the rising in your chest. Every sign of life that’s faded into the background— they’re gone. You try to scream as white fire runs through your ankle. You twist it around and around, far enough inside that it starts to hurt just to have some sort of control, but you can hardly judge the distance without all of your senses intact, and you realize you’ve twisted your ankle out of place too late. You can’t even open your mouth. 

You can’t hear either, you realize, as you feel the telltale scream of pain without the corresponding crack. Your vision is blurry, and it’s not because you can’t rub the sleep out of your eyes. Your glasses... you can’t look around for them, but you know they aren’t going to be there. You won’t need them anymore, not when this is done. This isn’t the Bifrost. Reality around you is too clean for that. You can make out right angles and whites at the edges of the room, and they stay in place. The only other motion in the room comes from her. Doctor Carmilla. You didn’t realize she was there, not without the sound of breathing. You didn’t know it. 

You didn’t realize how much the small physical reactions to terror helped. If anything, you would’ve said they were counterproductive. You can’t call for help when you’re hyperventilating. Screaming just draws attention to you. So impractical. Now having the ability to articulate your panic torn violently away from you makes everything worse. You can’t hyperventilate, because you’re not breathing. You can’t scream, because you’d tore your throat open to stop the sounds. That’s— your head protests again as hearing rushes back, too loud all at once, but you still can’t hear your heart in your chest. 

She’s singing, you realize, and it’s a song you recognize from too many trips to the prison. Sharp needles of pain run up and down your fingers, and you pull your left hand into a fist. You try to pull your left hand into a fist. You manage it for a second, but it slackens immediately. Everything in your body that you almost had control of goes weak again, at the thought of her, but the pain continues, nerves reconnecting. Her voice is light and beautiful, with a slender razor’s edge beneath it. You think of a butterfly. Colorful. Poisonous. Too fast to pin down. Except she won’t die in a matter of days. She won’t die at all. Not if she’s a Mechanism. 

You hear a click in your throat. You push so hard to reach up and wrap your hands around your neck, but you can’t. The clicks keep coming, metal on metal, with a rhythm that’s almost a heartbeat but wrong. There’s something wrong with you. Something like wings on a woman or a perfect recall that she claimed lasted for hundreds of thousands of years. What has she done to you?

“We know the void is screaming mad, no happy endings out there, lad,” you hear, and it’s nothing like when they sung it. When they sung it, you could almost feel the heat of a crowded bar against your uniform, the wild laughter of a cheering audience, and nothing would feel right again until you were alone, away from the claustrophobic pressure. Her voice, so close to you but so distant, is the echo into an almost empty street in a dusty Midgardian morning, “the book is lying open, there are tales to be told.” 

—

_It might be the Aurora that spots the lifeboat and their engineer that drags it inside, but it’s Ivy that recognizes it. She’s the only one who knows for a fact that their creator is still alive. The doctor was a long time ago, and most of them had managed to convince themselves that he was the end of things. The scientist, they justified, was smart and must’ve figured out how to survive their creator’s lab all by herself. She certainly didn’t say anything to contradict that idea._

_But the archivist knows, and she knows what happens next. She recognizes the symbol. She recognizes that certain aesthetic sensibility that was out of date with almost every single fad she knew._

_She doesn’t know she’ll recognize the husk of a person that their pilot carries out. The odds they left the system fast enough to escape Yog-Sothoth weren’t low, but the odds they’d live this long were far smaller. She’d almost put them out of their mind, even though she’d harbored a mild fondness for them. She looks to the others. The other two she was in prison on Midgard with recognize them at a slower pace, and when they do, they’re confused._

_“That’s Inspector Lyf,” the scientist says._

_“Damn, not even bleeding out with rainbows or whatever buck wild shit went down in Yggsadril after we got out of town?” the first mate asks. “Ivy?”_

_She nods and swallows._

_“99.94% chance it’s them.”_

_She knows what’s coming next. She doesn’t want to explain. There’s another body in the lifeboat, she sees now. Exsanguinated from the neck. Messier then 72% of her feedings from when the Mechanisms knew her, and 76.88% of the ones after, from what she’s able to track. Which isn’t very much. She doesn’t try._

_She climbs into the ship while the pilot puts them down on their feet, retrieving the black box and sliding it into her bag. From the Silvana’s lifeboat, not the one from the Ratoskar Express. That one she’d already copied. She’d play this one by herself._

_“I have to go back,” they say, and they flinch at the sound of their voice every time, “I have to—“_

_It’s not the same. It’s not different enough for the others to notice, but the archivist knows exactly what part of them their now-shared creator replaced. Their voice is wrong, replaced by something she prefers. Something she thinks she’s perfected, when there wasn't anything wrong in the first place._

_"Inspector Lyf..." she begins._

_“It’s you,” they say in between gasps for air, and they’re full of wonder and fear. What did she tell them? “Doctor said… she knew you…”_

_The engineer met the archivist’s eyes. She couldn’t look away. She knows too. She would, with what the Aurora told her about the style of the ship. She’d been hoping maybe, just maybe, it was a coincidence but not with that body. Not with their voice, so similar to her tastes in a harmony. So similar to hers._

_“Ivy, tell me I’m jumping to conclusions. Tell me they’re not one of us.”_

_The silence lingers._

_“The good Doc get you too, huh?” the first mate says, breaking it too late, and laughs. And laughs. And he doesn’t stop laughing until Marius shoots him. They flinch at the gunshot. Familiar to them by now._

_“You’re with family now. You feel like you need to go back because she biogprogrammed you not to leave her, right?” the scientist asks. Her tone is analytical, but she fidgets with her clothes and adjusts her wings too much. Not normal. This isn't normal. She didn't know their creator from anything outside of notes, but those notes include details that imply quite a lot about the relationship between her and the other Mechanisms._

_The fact the others refuse to talk about her in any detail also implies a lot._

_“Need to,” they moan, trying to escape the pilot’s grip. But he holds them tight, unsure of how stable they are on their feet. The scientist steps closer, examining their throat._

_“I should be able to fix it. Well. Adjust it. Probably some of the worst's gotten irreparably ingrained in your psyche already. What’s the range?”_

_“I don’t know—I didn’t want to leave— you can’t do that, you’re not as good as her, she's the only one who cares, the only one who can...”_

_“I’m glad my competition thinks so lowly of me that she managed to brainwash it into her latest hapless victim. I try not to do this sorta thing without asking first, but since I can’t exactly get informed consent out of you as you are now.”_

_“I don’t understand. You can’t change this. Nothing can change this.”_

_“Was Jonny this bad at first?” the gunner whispers to the engineer, who nods, then shrugs. “Fucking yikes.”_

_“We do impossible shit all the time. Remember the violins, Inspector Lyf?” That’s when the doctor reaches out his Mechanized arm, and it transforms into their They laugh weakly, a memory from just before everything went to shit surfacing. They were so angry at these idiots then. Over what? A bit of music? Sure, they’d killed people, but those people were doomed anyway. Doomed by the scale of the universe, as well as the monsters._

_Their music made a lot more sense now, in response to her haunting melodies. So much louder. No need for perfection. Not demanding. The claustrophobia of a crowded bar would be paradise, in comparison to the isolation of being alone with her._

_They don’t think they belong here. Not with this voice that isn’t theirs, not with how harsh they were before. But the once prisoners look at the inspector, and they see a long lost friend as well as a kindred spirit._

_“You’re not supposed to…” they say, and they’re not sure who they’re talking to._

_“Haven’t done a single thing I was supposed to since I was born,” the first mate says, finally recovered from the bullet to the head. “Terrible to meet’cha. I’m Jonny D’ville. Captain of the Aurora.”_

_“First mate,” the others correct. And then they say it too._  
-

"Shoot me,” Raphaella says, one night. It’s only been a couple of months since they found you— 39 Midgardian days to the 114 New Texan ones that the Mechanisms use. She sits on the end of the bed they assigned you, her wings folded back, and her legs crossed precisely. 

You think she might’ve been singing. You’re not sure how she got here, actually. You check the clock. Almost an entire hour since you last checked. You thought you’d been doing it obsessively. 

“What?” you sign. 

“Shoot me,” she repeats. 

You look at the gun Nastya gave you on the night stand. She’d said it was important to her, that if you lost it then she’d make you regret ever having lived, you’d said you already did, and she’d said that was the spirit. You’ve only touched it twice, and the second time was an accident. You’d nearly dropped it, your hands were shaking so badly. It’s not that she took your ability to fight altogether, but the pain of repeatedly slamming against that mental wall when you wanted so badly to just try is embedded deeply in your muscles. 

“I heard you that time.” “Okay, then pick up that gun and shoot me. I know you’ve wanted to.” 

“Yeah, when you were making my job a nightmare. I’m not exactly an inspector anymore.” You have to spell out a couple of words. Well, more than a few. Something squirms in your gut. The others have hundreds of thousands of years, millions in Nastya’s and Jonny’s cases, of learning languages that changed in what must seem like a blink of an eye to them. Raphaella, the second youngest, is still lifetimes older than your entire civilization, and Ivy, who teaches you North Midgardian sign, has a memory that’s better than perfect. You’re frustrated at your sluggish process when they’re already fluent anyway. It’s your planet. 

You belong among the stars. “Then do it because you like me.” 

“That’s a stretch.” 

She laughs like an angel, her wings rising up and down. You know she can be cold, but you’ve seen her burn as hot as the rest of them on the stage. Her light voice doesn’t betray her darkness, and she moves without care. 

“Just do it, Lyf. I promise, it’ll make you feel better.” 

“If you do, will you leave me alone?” She mock gasps, and you sigh, leaning forward and hesitating before placing your fingers on the weapon. It’s cold metal, unlike the pipes and the walls of the Aurora. You bit your lip to keep from releasing a sound— you know from experience that hearing your voice only makes it hurt worse. You can dig your teeth in deep, feel the blood pool before your wounds seal shut around you. You can hurt yourself so easily, and yet, the thought of laying a hand on anyone leaves you stunned and breathless. 

Maybe that’s because she was the only anyone in your life that lasted beyond a single night’s gig for years. Maybe your understanding of people is intertwined with you understanding of her, so those bioprogrammed chains that chaff so harshly against your mind mean you’ll never be able to defend yourself. She loosened them some, but she couldn't go further without breaking you again, and you're already so far gone. 

“You can do it. If you want, I’ll drag Marius in here and get him playing the violin.” 

With one hand grasped so tight around the weapon, you can’t sign the full fuck you so you flip her off with your left hand. It still feels forced. You’re out of practice with almost everything to do with living. She laughs again, and you feel the ghost of old indignation push your arms up, pointing your gun right at her chest. You shake violently, and you’re sure you’ll miss her, but when your finger finally slips, Raphaella’s shoulder is bloody. It’s an old weapon. Older than your planet. Each piece has been replaced a thousand times, but there’s no denying it’s the same gun. There are three lines scratched with care into the handle. They steady you. 

You drop the gun, shrinking inwards as best as you can. It’s instinct as old as they are, you suppose, to want to cover the vitals, but nothing about you is vital anymore. Nothing about you is fragile. Everything has been broken and replaced, limbs torn off and bones cracked to see how long it would take for them to grow back. You’ve been ground down. 

And your bullet is in her shoulder. She claps and smiles, even as she bleeds. She even holds back a laugh. You know it still hurts for her. She winces as they bullet worms its way out, falling on the fabric with a soft sound. It’s still covered in gore. 

“You’re okay,” you sign, and something else courses through your veins at the recoil. You’re well and truly present for the first time in… how long has it been? That’s not just happiness or faint amusement, that’s triumph. You smile with a weightlessness you'd forgotten. “You’re okay!” 

“Yeah!” She gives you a double thumbs up and lifts her wings. Your best friend had a canary growing up, and they told you that when he lifted his wings like that, it meant he was happy. You don’t know if that applies to Raphaella’s body language too, since they’re not exactly a canary, but it’d match with her stupid grin. 

You pull the gun up, more prepared for the recoil, and this time, the bullet glances off. You try again and again, each time feeling that same thrill run your through veins. You realize you’re still smiling when the chambers run empty. The room is splattered in Raphaella’s blood. The scene would’ve horrified you once, but the black box left the mutilation of all of old Asgard’s royalty burned into the back of your vision, and Carmilla wasn’t shy about forcing you to help her feed. Knowing the violence is at your hands should make you sick, but you’re far from the overworked Inspector you were when you first met the Mechanisms. You’re still shaking, but you put down the gun in order to sign that you’re laughing. 

She’s so close. You practically shot her at point blank range. You’re one of them. You’re home. It’s a belonging that only sinks in now. All yours clothes are hand-me-downs, new Aurora patches sewn where old ones were ripped out to app to the new outfit. They’re ragged as all hell; since Mechanisms don’t age, all their clothes are retired from wear and tear and too many gunshots. You stole a couple of Marius’s belts, a white dress shirt from Nastya’s closet, and a skirt from Ivy, but you picked from the tamest options. You don’t even know how to put makeup on. 

That makes you laugh even harder, and Raphaella gets even closer. 

“Can I hold you?” she asks. 

“Of course,” you sign, but it’s an automatic answer. She cocks an eyebrow, and you don’t know why that arrogant expression used to piss you off so much. This is a woman that’s been through an unspecified eternity of hell. She barely flinched when the bullets bit into her flesh, a feat you know from painful personal experience to categorize as goddamn impressive. Yet, she still fidgets and bumps her head up and down. You correct yourself. You know what you really want. “Um. Sorry-- can I be allowed to hold you? Instead?” 

“Yes,” she says, and it’s a word that means so many things. You move forward, wrapping your hands over her shoulder. Her blood soaks into the fabric, but you’re not on the edge of throwing up. She leans her head against your back, wings gently expanding around the two of you. You realize you’re crying. You don’t stop feeling her cold hands on your face, that touch that should be reassuring, safe, digging in the cracks of your armor. The looks Jonny and Nastya gave each other when they realized makes you think maybe it doesn’t get better. But for now, Raphaella is warm. This ship is warm. The tears and blood streaking down your cheeks is warm. 

She pulls the blankets on the bed up around your shoulders, and you might not feel safe, but you feel strong. For now, that’s enough.


End file.
